


In the Silences Are Secrets

by musamihi



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Kidnapping, M/M, Psychological Torture
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-11-04
Updated: 2013-02-23
Packaged: 2017-11-17 23:51:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,303
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/554581
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/musamihi/pseuds/musamihi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Breaking down an ordinary man wouldn't normally be worth Jim's time, but if Sherlock insists on being disappointingly sentimental, he supposes he'll have to stoop.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Being written for [this prompt](http://sherlockbbc-fic.livejournal.com/19351.html?thread=116720023&) on the LJ kink meme. Warnings in future parts will include explicit sexual content, suicidal thoughts and behavior, and yet more angst.

The walls are moving – he can swear to that. Layers and layers of the same screaming white sanitary paint have been slapped up over the insides of this cell over so many years that it looks almost soft, that its edges seem to crawl at the periphery of his vision. Everything vibrates with the hornet-buzz of the savage, flickering lights recessed into the ceiling. Everything is moving, everything except for him.

The air, the light, the sound, and his own breath and pulse and throat twist up into an unbearable anticipation, like a cramp that _must_ release or a whine that _must_ resolve to an explosion. It's too quiet and that won't last, it never lasts, two minutes of this and his body begins to shiver toward collapse because he knows it's coming but he can't know when. Just do it now, just get it over with –

Greg throws his hands up over his ears. Nothing happens. There are tears in his eyes, but there are always tears in his eyes – he isn't crying, not really. He just can't get rid of them. Maybe it's the lights. Maybe it's the fact he hasn't slept in – how long? Since he found himself here. He keeps drying his face on the back of his bare arm and it keeps coming away wet and there is nothing he can do.

He starts counting where he left off. Eight thousand six hundred and ninety-four, eight thousand six hundred and ninety-five, eight thousand six hundred and ninety-six –

And then the room explodes around him in a deafening screech, high and throbbing like a desperate, broken engine, metal on ripping metal. He tries so hard to keep counting but all he can do is hold his breath and imagine that's keeping everything still inside of him, that everything will stop if he stops.

Silence slams down again and he collapses, gasping (how long? a minute? two?) onto the mattress and into one of the only moments of comfort he can hope for, the brief period of relief that comes from knowing the onslaught has just ended. Slowly he learns to distinguish once again the sound of the lights from the panicked beat of blood in his own ears. The mattress rustles underneath him. It's foam, a single slab in a seamless plastic cover, lying directly on the cement floor. He's chilly in the flimsy cotton trousers that are all he has to wear, but he knows that's not why he keeps shivering. The room is not particularly cold. When he first woke up here to that horrifying mechanical wail, the room felt stuffy, too warm. It was days ago, he thinks, but he can't be sure. Food keeps getting shoved under the door, but the intervals seem irregular, not that he has any way of counting. 

He hasn't touched the last three or four plates he's been given; he simply isn’t hungry. The water he chokes down whether he likes it or not, because he knows he has to, but he can't bring himself to take another sandwich. Not yet. 

Shutting his eyes, he tries to count. To relax. But the fear has already begun to build up again, waiting for that shattering noise. 

_When? Now? Not now. Soon. When?_

He covers his ears at every imagined sound. A couple of times he thinks he's fallen asleep, but that's even worse; he wakes to what feels like his heart imploding behind his ribs and to the most intense desire for rest that he has ever felt in his life. He's stopped wondering why this is happening. He just wants it to end.

All the images he usually uses to comfort himself are unavailable to him. His wife, having a lie-in on a sunny Saturday, naked, dishevelled, soft – someone else's now, and still a little too raw to touch. The funny cricket-quiet of his grandfather's house by the shore, impossible to imagine in this soup of terrible chaos that would have been unimaginable to the boy he'd been then. The bleary, four AM breakfast he once took in a café with Sherlock, drifting in the kind of quiet camaraderie that came from sharing a pot of coffee while covered in mud and that made him wonder for the very first time whether _maybe_ there was some part of Sherlock that hung low enough that a man like him could hope to touch it. And then after –

No, he can't think about that one – he'll start hoping. Because Sherlock, who solves everything, will find him. But if he starts wondering _when_ , he will go completely raving mad. _Don't think about that._

There's a clang and a squeal of hinges and Greg digs the heels of his palms into his ears and shoves his chin down against his chest, but – then, silence. This is new. He takes his shaking hands away from the sides of his head and looks up to see a man walking slowly, tentatively through the now-open door. It's at that moment he realizes he's curled up with his knees to his chest and his elbows tucked in against his middle, that he must look ridiculous, that he's contorted like some kind of child, and he forces himself to straighten into a slightly more acceptable pose. He hasn't seen another person in … well. It must be days.

"Hello," the man says, making Greg cringe at the sound. But nothing follows – just more words, all spoke in a shy, quiet voice, the softest thing he can remember hearing. "My name's Jim."

Greg glares up at him, wondering whether he can manage to pull himself to his feet. He's not stupid. Men don't just wind up in cells. He's exhausted and half out of his mind because of it, and it's not an accident. Someone put him here, and odds are it's the man who can open the door.

"You must be confused." Jim leans back against the wall beneath the cell's small, rubber-coated showerhead. He's wearing jeans and a blue T-shirt with a bright yellow star and he looks half a boy, really, not a prison guard. "Do you know where you are?"

That takes some of the wind out of Greg's sails – his hostile _where the hell am I_ dies in his chest. Just as well, because it takes him ten seconds to get his voice working again. "Wherever it is you put me, I imagine." The words hurt coming out of him, but he swallows that back and unfolds himself, standing and staying stubbornly upright as his starving body tries to convince him that he ought to tip head-first into the wall. He's taller than Jim. That's nice. He'll take what he can get. He crosses his arms over his chest and tries not to shake.

Jim doesn't look intimidated; on the contrary, he seems to waver against the edge of the wall as though he wants to advance. "I'm a friend of Sherlock's," he says, pressing on without, Greg notices, denying anything – but he's smiling nervously as though hoping to be approved of, speaking in a rush that speaks of a desire to please. "I've told him you're here. We're waiting for him now, but I –"

"Where is he?" Greg won't let himself be fooled into letting his guard down. He's too good for that. Jim's a pro at playing nice if he's ever seen one, but he knows better. He _knows_ better. He's been conducting interrogations for decades.

He's just … so tired. His instincts have abandoned him. His gut won't say a damned thing to him but _sleep_ and his head is full of fog and sound.

"I don't know," Jim says quietly. "I'm sorry. I've been waiting to hear from him, but –"

"What did you tell him?"

"– But he's been ignoring me." An apologetic smile twitches across Jim's mouth. His eyes, Greg thinks, look incredibly kind, but he can't decide why. He wishes he could _think_. They're slightly red around the edges, as though he's been crying. _Or maybe he's just tired._ "I guess," Jim continues, rueful, "we have something in common."

Something dreadful stirs in Greg's chest – vague, distant, but terribly dark. He swallows, as though that will push it down. "I want to talk to him."

"Oh, so do I. I'm sorry." Jim pushes himself away from the wall, sticking his hands in his pockets. "I'm sure he'll get in touch. Don't worry. I'll let you know the minute he calls."

And then Jim is moving toward the door again, and Greg feels viscerally that he wants him to _stay_ , although he can't say why. Fear builds in him when Jim's hand falls on the door handle. "Wait – I just –"

"I'm sure I'll see you soon," Jim whispers, slipping out into the darkened corridor. When the latch clicks to behind him and the heavy metal sound of the bolts turns in Greg's ears he realizes why he's so desperate for his new – what? keeper? companion? – to stay. Since Jim's arrival everything has been blessedly quiet.

"Come back," he rasps, slapping his hand weakly against the door. His only answer is the blast and squeal of metal on metal.

***

Seven days.

Greg has been gone for seven days, and every clue – in his office, in his home, in his car – is worthless, obviously planted. If Jim had wanted to fool him, he might have been able to do, but it's clear he never had any such intention. He means for this to be obvious. _I have your pet policeman,_ Sherlock can almost hear him say. _Catch me if you can._

He wonders if Jim knows what he has.

It doesn't matter. Jim has him. Jim has been kind enough to supply a live video feed, in fact, and Sherlock goes through the motions of having someone try to trace it, but he knows that will gain him nothing. He tunes in when he can, annoyed because nothing is happening. Greg goes from looking angry and stoic to looking confused, from confused to wretched in the space of three days, and Sherlock supposes that's about right. The effects of sleep deprivation (and, he notes with vexation, the effects of hunger, which could easily be avoided if Greg would just eat what's being given him) are variable, but three full days would likely be enough to drive a strong, healthy man to erratic behaviour, to symptoms similar to Greg's sunken, defensive postures, his erratic movements. It's hard to tell, but by day five he suspects Greg may be experiencing auditory hallucinations. No surprise, considering the god awful noise Jim's using to keep him awake. When Sherlock watches, he watches on mute if at all possible.

He's watching for clues, of course, because Jim wouldn't leave him out to dry completely. What fun would that be? There will be a sign, a hint, when Jim chooses to give him one. He just has to wait. Sometimes he finds himself watching for no reason at all, just for something to look at. It's like having a fish tank. _So,_ he thinks, feeling little beyond curiosity, _this is what it looks like when you're breaking._

It's not much different than _this is what you taste like_ , the first time they kissed in the alley outside that sleepy café, or _this is what you smell like_ when he buried his face in the hair behind Greg's ear later that morning, or _this is what it's like to be in love with you_ , months later. He felt them all, of course, and he feels them now. He feels this. But there is always a bit of him that stands apart, watching. He finds it's much easier to retreat to that vantage point for now, and he expects that's what Jim wants, anyway. Mustn't disappoint Jim. He gets so awfully cranky. He'll take his toys and go home.

So Sherlock watches, and waits, and is rewarded for his saintly patience with absolutely nothing of any value. John considerately offers to watch for him, and even more kindly doesn't object or look at him like he's some sort of monster when he says no, thank you, he'd rather do it himself. Jim is taking his sweet time and Greg is talking to himself (which Sherlock is inclined to think of as a positive development, because Greg is, for now, coherent and simply trying to entertain himself) and nothing is happening. Even when Jim finally shows his face, their conversation is brief and useless and impenetrable. 

He shuts off the feed for the night, knowing nothing earth-shattering will happen. If Jim doesn't know exactly when he's watching, he'll eat his own scarf. And Jim would never let him miss the show.


	2. Chapter 2

Counting has ceased to have any meaning ( _once I get to fifty thousand, to a hundred thousand, to two hundred_ is only making him hate the unchanging walls and the unforgiving door), but Greg finds some occupation in crawling back through his life, piecing together the events that brought him here and climbing that tenuously constructed chain backwards in time. The last thing he remembers before this wailing cell is stepping into an empty lift. Before that, knocking the remnants of his morning's cold coffee onto his office carpet, leaving a long, splattered stain. No – first the stain, then the knocking, if it's all to be backwards. Then logging off his computer, then searching for a four month-old email, then waving goodnight to Davis, then spending two hours pouring over the Dartmouth file, and so on, and so on, and so on.

The sound, as he's come to think of it, harries the process even when it's not raging through him. He can concentrate barely long enough to link two memories together, and whatever watery image he's trying to pin down when the sound sinks its sharp edge into his brain and _shoves_ invariably dissolves, and all the working parts of his mind collapse and scatter like a bucket of bolts kicked across a floor. It takes him longer to recover each time, but he finds that talking helps. That he remembers better if the words are hanging in the air for his ears to gather.

He plays with the idea, for a little while – the space of a couple of sandwiches, one of which he eats out of a reflexive sense of duty – that the entire world is hanging in his ears.

Some memories stop and skip and refuse to be manipulated, playing again and again and again and working themselves into corners of him that he doesn't want to touch. Lying in bed in the morning waiting for his alarm to go off feels full of gut-shredding dread, but was that the case before the thought of an alarm made him want to rip his own hair out? He knows he felt _something_ that morning, every morning, maybe less a dread than a disappointment, the dull, ever lessening surprise at waking up alone. That's hard to get used to, that and coming home to no one. The uneasy sense of purposelessness is like running in a dream from nothing or watching the hands of a clock spin and knowing that there's something he should be doing, that he promised to do, but that he can't, that maybe he's forgotten. He feels it when he wakes up and when he goes to bed and when he eats alone and all that alleviates it is when he has Sherlock to hold onto, to touch, to please, to spend his time on, time that moves slower because it has real, happy weight to bear. He hates being alone, he has always hated it, he has always needed someone, he needs someone, someone –

When Jim walks in, his footsteps silent in the ringing wake of yet another deafening hell, Greg wonders how much of this he's been saying aloud.

Jim's wearing the same shirt, and Greg has no idea how much time has passed, but surely it's more than that? It can't be the same day. That star in its blue field makes him feel as though he's floating, nauseous. All the same, he's glad to see him. Jim means silence, he remembers that much, but even if he didn't, he's another face, someone real and alive and responsive.

"I'm sorry," Jim says, standing in the center of the cell this time, his hands wedged in the pockets of his tight jeans. His posture is that of a chastised child, stooped and closed. "He hasn't called yet. I thought he would – I really did."

Greg forces himself to stand, although his knees are like stubborn hinges and the muscles in his back are desperately contracting. "I know how to find him. I know –" Stupid, why didn't he say this before? "I can call him for you, he'll listen to me. If you –"

"No, no," Jim soothes him, his head lolling to one side, his mouth curling up at the corner in a sympathetic grimace. "No. Sit down – it's all right. Sit." He takes a seat on the very edge of the small metal toilet in the corner, and so Greg plants his hand on the wall and lowers himself again onto his featureless bed. "He knows you're here," Jim continues, an eager smile spreading over his face. He reminds Greg of a boy pleading his case, of a child desperate for a kind word, but he isn't, he's a jailer, isn't he? "I've told him already. He knows. I was hoping you'd bring him here, that's all. I thought for sure that if I told him about you – well. I had to find a way to bring him here. Like I said, he's been ignoring me. He does that, doesn't he?"

Greg doesn't move, doesn't smile, doesn't speak, but he feels a little stab of sympathy before he can block it.

Jim's head sinks into his hands. When he raises it again his smile is gone, replaced by a quiet sort of fear. "I thought for certain he'd come," he mutters, before fixing Greg with an entreating stare. "It is you, isn't it? He'll come for you. There's no one else? He does need you, doesn't he? I was so sure he would call." A long pause, Greg's throat closing, _no one else_ rattling in his skull like a loose bone. "You're being very quiet," Jim prompts, gently. "I'm sorry. You must be tired."

"If you let me help," Greg rasps at last, "I can help you find him. I know where he is. Please." He hates himself for not asking the obvious question, for not dragging out of Jim – who looks like he'd be pretty easy to crack – what he wants with Sherlock in the first place. He doesn't doubt that someone means Sherlock harm. That Sherlock is in trouble. That he shouldn't be offering to sniff him out for someone who might put him somewhere like _this_. He's just a miserable coward – he doesn't want to hear the answer if it means knowing he'll have to endure this indefinitely. If only he could get out, get Sherlock, he could think of something.

"Get Sherlock," Jim says, and Greg realizes he's been speaking without hearing himself.

_Get Sherlock._ Greg shuts his eyes and fights back the familiar wet burn of tears. He isn't crying – his throat is dry but relaxed, his breathing normal. The tears just won't stop. "I can, I can help you find him –"

"Look, it's all right." Jim stands, leaning over him slightly, comforting, reassuring, and Greg stares at that star and wishes he were outside. "Someone will call for you – he'll pass the word on. Your job, they'll be looking for you. It's what they do. Isn't it? They'll need you back."

They will be looking for him, Greg knows, but it's not because they need him. It's because it's their job. He nods anyway, remembering waving goodnight to Davis and knocking his coffee onto the carpet.

"And your wife. She'll be worried –"

"Ex-wife."

"Oh. Yes." A nervous laugh. "That's what I meant to say – I'm sorry. At any rate, she'll be worried. Ex or not. Sherlock wouldn't let her fret, I'm sure."

Sherlock absolutely would, but more than that, she won't be worried. He hasn't spoken to her in nearly two weeks; she probably won't even notice. It's the longest they've gone without hearing each other's voices in twenty years. How long has he been here?

"I'm sorry I don't have any better news. But someone will call soon, you'll see. I just wanted to keep you up to date." Jim's voice is retreating toward the door, and Greg can't look at him, can't watch him leave. It'll start again as soon as he's gone and he can't even remember what he was remembering, the sound will throw him all to pieces and he'll have to start all over again –

He lets out a shuddering breath. "Don't go yet." _Please stay._ He doesn't say it now and he didn't say it then, Sherlock climbing out of his bed and scooping up his trousers and disappearing into the shower. Cooling bed. Empty. Empty. He misses him, but he is always missing him.

"Sorry," Jim sings over the violent noise of the latch. "But it won't be long, now."

All Greg sees is white. White walls, white door, white skin on white sheets that's gone too soon, white noise dancing around in the light and waiting to swarm together like locusts and eat him alive.

***

Sherlock knows her name is Angela, and has probably known and discarded it several times before. Her name only found a permanent place in his mind a few months ago, when it was cropping up with great and obnoxious frequency on the screen of Greg's phone. He hasn't grown any fonder of her since then. How could he? He knows nothing about her. She's a force to him, a catalyst for various moods or actions he had to endure during the tumultuous period of Greg's divorce, of the beginning of their own romantic connection. He's gone to a moderate amount of trouble not to learn any more about her than he needs in order to attempt to convince Greg that the inexplicable residual discomfort (whether guilt, anger, or some other sentiment – Sherlock doesn't know which) he's been unable to jettison after the divorce is unwarranted and a waste of both of their time.

But now John's let her in and she's taken a seat on the sofa, so he's left with little choice but to be civil. He has no news, no further evidence, nothing that could possibly be of any comfort to her, but turning her tersely out of doors is exactly the sort of thing that will get him a lecture if he tries it.

"Mrs. …" He lets the question linger in the air, well aware that he's only attempting to be rude, and annoyed with himself for caring whether or not she knows how little he cares for her. 

In any case, she ignores the feint. "They're not telling me anything," she says, quietly but with a frayed edge of desperation. "The police. It's been three days since I've heard anything out of them." Her eyes are red and tired, her mouth is weak, but her posture is aggressive – straight-backed and forward-leaning, her hands clasped neatly over her knees. Needy, Sherlock decides. Overly emotional. Just the sort of person Greg would revel in clinging to, because he does so like to be _needed_. "But it's been more than a week, almost a week and a –"

"There's nothing to tell." Sherlock doesn't shrug, but it's a close thing. "If they had any new information, I'm sure they would pass it along."

"Maybe not now."

"Legally speaking, certainly, you have no automatic right to any of it, but I hardly think –"

"I need to know," she snaps, one hand curling suddenly into her skirt. "I care about him –"

"Fine way you have of showing it."

She turns her head and stares, flat, at the arm of the sofa, and the defiant cast to her eyes brings upon him a thoroughly unwelcome wave of what feels like _sympathy_ , a feeling he dams up at once – at once, but not soon enough to stop the memory from slipping instantaneously to mind. The slamming door, Greg's rushed and heavy footfalls down the stairs, and John's stubborn silence, more condemnatory than any glare. _I don't see why he had to be so sensitive about it,_ Sherlock said, and John had simply replied, _Because you're being an absolute bastard._ He hadn't meant to, he told himself, and was it his fault Greg couldn't spend a few seconds to step back and realize Sherlock was only trying to _help_ him see why what he was feeling didn't make any sense? But it stung all the same, and it still stings, being looked at as though one were only cruel and heartless, having to try and try again to make someone understand a very simple state of affairs ( _I love you_ ) only to be undermined at every turn by unforeseen pitfalls in etiquette, vocabulary, even touch.

He loves Greg. He does. He's even said it, because apparently that's important. Maybe she loved him once, maybe she still does – he doesn't care. He doesn't want to care. 

But they do seem to have something in common. 

And so when she asks him if he has anything, _anything_ he can tell her, he shows her – out of something almost like respect – a few moments of the video feed, of Greg, twitchy in the extreme and muttering now, but unharmed.

All she does is burst into tears, of course, and he should have known she'd disappoint him. They all do – and what's fairer than that? He knows, no matter what they say, that he disappoints them, too. And he sits up at night in his cold bed, grey under the silent glow of his laptop, and wonders why his eyes are dry and whether, in some ways, they might all be right. 

Thankfully, though, he only has so much patience for wallowing. When he finally falls asleep all he really feels is irritation. There's a clue, and knowing Jim, it's being shoved directly in his face, and he just can't see it. 

And for _that_ , he is sorry.


	3. Chapter 3

Greg's saying something when Jim walks in, this time – he doesn't know what it is, whether it's a prayer or a song or a remembered conversation, but he stops, confused, when the door opens and the blue shirt with the yellow star and the smiling man come inside and sit on the little metal toilet, brightly laced trainers inches from the creaking foam mattress. He knows he shouldn't be talking; he has the presence of mind to realize that he should be embarrassed. That speaking to no one (if that's who he's been speaking to) is not really the done thing.

But Jim doesn't seem to mind. His face is, as always, soft and kind and a little anxious. "How are you feeling?" he asks, his voice almost inaudible in the ringing quiet.

"Tired." All Greg feels is tired. He doesn't feel angry – he still knows that Jim is (or is in league with) his jailer, still knows he's being held against his will, but somehow he can't resent it. When he tries, when he tries to get angry, it's like his mind simply won't hold the shape – it collapses, exhausted, into amorphous and atrophied flab. He doesn't have the energy. He is tired, and he is disappointed, but at least when Jim's here he's not entirely lonely.

Jim nods, pursing his lips. "You must be. Do you want to try to sleep?"

Greg's stomach tightens around the apple he made himself eat – this morning? Yesterday? "No." If he says yes, Jim will leave. The noise will start. No. "I’m all right. I was just –" Just what? _Say something. Think of something. Keep him talking. Anything, anything at all._

"You were talking about Sherlock," Jim says at once, an eager little flicker of something sharp passing over his face. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to eavesdrop. But I wanted to come tell you – I wish I had better news." In the pause Greg feels nothing but growing numbness – can numbness grow? – like a screw turning in a vice that's already shattered through its object. "I don't think he's coming."

"He knows I'm here." That sounds familiar. That feels right in his mouth. He stares, and his vision is swallowed up in blue and yellow until Jim clears his throat, and then every line and shadow of his face seems cut too clearly in the light, like a picture that's been sharpened too much in forensics. 

"I keep telling him," Jim says with a nod. The apology behind those words is so clear that Greg can only lean back against the wall and stare at his own knees and grope for some reason to be optimistic. His chin is collapsing forward onto his chest when Jim says, "Tell me about him. Were you close?"

 _Close?_ Strange how he can hardly remember his own address, how his brain is all but soup, and yet this familiar wall of secrecy falls into place without a hitch. "He works for me." Greg swallows and rubs at the back of his neck with a shaking hand, and tries to tread carefully, but it's like being absolutely pissed and trying to walk a line. "Sometimes. When I'm on a case that I can't – that is, if he wants to –"

"I know all that, yes. You don't have to tell me." Jim laughs, his slight figure rocking backward a few inches. "We all know about that – the two of you used to pop up in the papers every now and again, didn't you? Now it's that other fellow more, isn't it, but … yes, I remember. But you must have been more than that. A man doesn't work with someone for that many years and not become something like a friend."

Greg actually smiles. It feels strange. "Do you know him very well?" he asks, knowing he should ask _how_ Jim knows him, but somehow unwilling to lift that curtain. No one knows Sherlock very well. It took three years for him to say so much as a word to Greg that wasn't about a case – and even then, it wasn't pleasant. _Why so rushed, Inspector? You can't possibly want to go home._

"I do," Jim says with a heavy nod. His mouth is cruel for the first time since Greg's met him. "I know him very well."

Greg's mind leaps to another white room, to another mouth that changed, to Sherlock pressed flat and writhing against the spotless tile of the shower in the hotel bathroom. The muscles in his thighs and arse quivered under Greg's hands and Greg ground into him, desperate, wild in the thick steam, and his mouth moved across the hot slick surface of the side of Sherlock's neck, _fuck, honey, you like that, come on, I know you like that_ , and he could see Sherlock's face in the mirror that hung over the sink and it was so open and so full of pleasure and his mouth was so … so soft, and Greg had two simultaneous thoughts, the first full of pride, _I did that_ , and the second full of despair, _but you never look that way when you're looking_ at _me_. 

"He let you fuck him, didn't he?" Jim dissolves the memory as easily as coffee over sugar. "None of it's your fault, you know."

Greg doesn't want to know what he means. All he wants is to go back to that, to be there and be warm and be –

"You couldn’t know. It's just how he is – it was you, and now it's John, but next month, who knows? Cleverer men than you have misread him. You can't blame yourself."

Something about that is wrong, but Greg isn't sure what it is. His grip on time has become so weak as to be almost nonexistent; it floats around him in unpredictable pieces and collapses dangerously in crashing, squealing noise, like every other force of nature. John? Sherlock and John have never – and Greg and Sherlock _still_ are, aren't they? _Aren't we?_ Is that over? It can't be over, he still needs it, he has to get out of here –

He must look distressed, because Jim leans forward with a solicitous curve of his shoulders. "You knew," he says softly, "you always knew he didn't need you. It's all right – there's nothing to be ashamed of in what you've done. He's duped a lot of people, and you were so giving. He's the one who should be ashamed."

A confused battle between the need for secrecy – because this _is_ secret, and always has to be if he and Sherlock are going to be allowed to work together – and the need to tell Jim that he's wrong rages in the bit of Greg's brain that's not screaming for sleep. Sherlock hasn't duped him, not about this. Sherlock loves him. He's even said it, and it wasn't that long ago – was it? Everything is jumbling up, kisses in dark corners, groping in the back of his car, surprisingly warm conversation over boxes of takeaway, sex that makes him wake up in the middle of the night aching with the sheer memory of it. This is his life. He remembers it so clearly, or at least snatches of it.

But maybe it was forever ago.

He means to ask, but Jim is still talking.

"Not a lot of people would have done that for a man like him," Jim says, smoothing his hands down across his knees. "Not a lot people would have left their wives for someone like Sherlock. I think it was brave. He would call it stupid, I suppose, but he calls lots of things stupid. You would know."

And that shuts Greg down. For the first time he can't wait for Jim to leave, can't wait to be alone again so that he can let this mask fall. The truth is too shameful and too painful to admit even to the only human he's seen in weeks, the only human he might ever see again. When Jim goes and the door closes Greg's usual panic attack is slow to arrive, sluggish under the weight of his own misery.

He never left his wife. He never would have. Oh, he and Sherlock argued about it for months, and those are some of the times he least cares to remember – Sherlock has never been shy about calling him stupid, but he never did it so cruelly as he did then. _She's fucking three other men, you complete fool_ , he said so many times there's no counting them. _Only an idiot would let himself be treated that way. Only a stupid dog would keep going back to her. What's the matter with you?_ (Greg thinks he said it, anyway; admittedly he can't hear it in Sherlock's voice just now, but the words bubble up out of him like boiling groundwater, so they must be true.) But he never left her, because – as he told Sherlock over and over – he made a promise. Marriage, promise, forever. And he believed, he absolutely believed, that she needed him. She was determined to wound him and treated him like dirt, but he stood tall and steady and took it because without him, what would she do? He wouldn't abandon her. It burned him to go to bed beside her every night, but life was about making sacrifices for the people you were supposed to care for. He would stay by her side no matter how deeply Sherlock's arguments got under his skin, because he knew she needed him, and God knew he wasn't good at very many things, but he was good at staying.

And then she left him.

He didn't even have the courage to tell Sherlock the truth, although he's never sure what Sherlock knows or doesn't know. He told him that he'd had enough, that he was moving out. That Sherlock was right, it was time to get a divorce. That he was taking the initiative. That he was relieved. That he'd decided. And even though nothing had ever hurt him so badly as realizing that no one was leaning on him, he consoled himself with the knowledge that Sherlock wanted him. Sherlock fought for him. Sherlock needed him.

Now he's alone, with nothing to do but wait and feel his chest collapse in on itself from the pressure of fear and solitude, and the worst part isn't even that he needs Sherlock and Sherlock isn't here. Worse than that by far, and worse than the noise that whips at him whenever he shuts his eyes, is the strange, shifting, nameless voice in his head wondering whether any of this will matter at all.

***

The answer comes in the sound of Greg's voice.

The laptop and its constant video feed are, as always, muted, a silent show of black and white and disintegration; but in bed, with his ear pressed to the pillow and the sound of his own pulse beating through his head, Sherlock hears it. He's half asleep, tossing in and out of fancy and oblivion as he often does in the very early hours of the morning, and Greg is in his ear, whispering things he never said but might as well have. Funny how memory and imagination come together so seamlessly in the dark to create chimaeras no rational man has any business entertaining.

The words are undifferentiated, an inhuman, indecipherable murmur that nonetheless his brain identifies as _Greg_ as surely as it knows in a dream that the slippery alien signs covering books, phones, and computers are words. He strains to make sense of the sound like he squints to read the contentless markings on imagined pages. He wants to hear and to understand. Echoes and infuriating fragments come to him, resounding in his skin more than in his ears, and when he wakes he has to cope with the indignity of a throbbing erection and the knowledge that he's been sharply, desperately aroused by something he can't even fully remember. He stumbles to the shower, irritated.

He tries not to reflect on the bleak day that lies ahead of him as he reaches in to turn the tap. In some ways, his life has become as monotonous as Greg's, owned by that damn video and the restraints it's put on his work, his thoughts, his sleep. What did he dream about last night? The sound of Greg's voice tumbles through his mind like a changing wind in a cave, garbled with the slap of the water against tile, the squeak of the hinge as he steps into –

Oh.

Did Jim know? He moves under the water and wonders, his shoulders releasing pleasantly as his upper back relinquishes a death grip on his spine he hadn't even noticed. Did Jim guess, somehow, that he would prefer not to listen, that the only parts he'd consent to hear would be the ones in which Jim spoke to him? (Well, to Greg, ostensibly – but they both know that isn't true.) He doubts it; not because it would be unlike Jim to punish him for a sentimental weakness – and _I'd rather not listen to him cry_ is a sentimental weakness – but because Jim's not likely to have suspected it at all. Jim strapped John to a bomb not to play on Sherlock's heartstrings, but for a clever twist – to show off, to prove how _close_ he could get without being detected. _Look what I can do_. And now he's done it again. _Fool me once …_

And although of course Sherlock isn't angry, he is – strange to say – sadder than he can remember being. He's in no hurry to remove himself from this blind little room of steam. None of the usual energy or lift attends this discovery. He can't recall the last time he felt _dread_ at the prospect of finally untangling a mystery, the last time he decided he'd prefer to stand under the shower than get to work. Perhaps it's just the daunting size of the job (all those hours and days to revisit – he'll extract the audio to a visual format to look for patterns, of course, but the _amount_ of data hardly inspires excitement), but perhaps it's simply that he's disappointed in himself. He's been too squeamish, too slow, because he's been selfish. Because he hasn't wanted to sit with Greg in that room – not entirely. Because until now emotional separation has always been the best, the most efficient, and – happily – the easiest policy, has always enabled him to apply himself to the best possible results.

But this time it's been nothing but a shirking of his duty. It's been a cheap refuge. He's known all along he owes Greg more than the standard _sang froid_ , but it's been so easy, so convenient, to shut out his voice and continue as though this were simply the usual case. It's cost Greg almost two weeks, and maybe something more. He's served no one but himself, and he can't pretend he has. If he truly wanted to spare Greg the pain and to bring him home as quickly as possible, why has he shied back from the painful necessities?

He watches his blurred white reflection in the glass and wonders what's behind it – what Greg sees. What Jim sees. What is.

The water's run cold by the time he grabs his towel and moves out onto the mat, and his body is quiet again, white and chill and a little numb under his fingers. Unfeeling. Better, he tells himself, but he knows now that's not quite right. It isn't better; it's only cold. 

Settled on the sofa, he does John (who comes out to the sitting room in his dressing gown looking a little put out by the lack of hot water) the courtesy of keeping his headphones in. He tracks the ear-splitting interruptions on the live feed, logging times, durations, intensities, as he begins stripping the relevant track out of the two hundred and eighty hours he has archived. In the end, it's not as difficult as he feared it might be – the sounds are annoying, but Greg is largely silent. In the soundless stretches Sherlock watches him. He keeps mostly to the corner, his head between his knees. Once, Sherlock realizes, with a leap of his heart so sudden and so high his throat closes up, Greg even falls asleep – but jolts awake immediately, his eyes wide with terror, and dissolves at once into a rocking, sobbing mess. His head is turned to the floor, so Sherlock is, by and large, spared his face. It hardly matters; it's the only thing he sees, regardless.

John sits in his chair and pretends to be reading, and hardly moves for eight hours.

By early the next morning Sherlock has discovered the pattern. The rest is simple enough. This part was clearly never intended to be difficult; Jim must be pulling his hair out wondering what's got into him. Unless he already knows, which is probably worse.

Sherlock sets out without further delay for the warehouse in the western reaches of Brussels where he knows he'll find what he's looking for; he'll make the day's first train. His phone, warm and heavy in his pocket, his one connection to Greg's cell now that he's on the road, is a constant reminder that his time is not his own. Luckily, he only has a few more hours to wait.


End file.
